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The Almost People (TV story)
The Almost People 'is the sixth episode of the sixth series of ''Doctor Who. It was written by Matthew Graham, directed by Julian Simpson and featured Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor, Karen Gillan as Amy Pond and Arthur Darvill as Rory Williams. Overview To be added Synopsis As the dopplegangers - 'gangers' for short - fight their makers, both Doctors, the real one and his ganger, try to find a way to restore the power and get everyone off the island. Both Doctors claim to be the 100% real thing, something Amy can't quite grasp. Rory, meanwhile, is trying to find Jennifer but when he locates her and her ganger, he can't tell them apart. Having selected one of them, they discover of a company secret forces their hand. He soon realizes he's made an error. There is another ganger in the group however. Plot The Ganger Doctor starts iterating fragments of previous regenerations, struggling to adjust to all the previous incarnations plumbed into him by the real Doctor. As the Gangers of Cleaves, Jimmy and Dicken pound on the door to the chapel, trying to burst in, the Doctor tries to help his Ganger work through the confusion and stabilise. Once he's fully stable, the Gangers back away from the door to attempt another form of attack, attempting to melt the door away with acid. The Doctors find a shaft connected to the Flesh bowl that the humans escape through just as the Gangers break in. Meanwhile, Rory follows Ganger Jennifer around the monastery, keeping to the shadows. Acid pools continue to plague the factory causing thick gas so the humans retreat the evacuation tower to try and get above it and restore the power. Ganger Cleaves deduces their plan but also acknowledges that her human counterpart can defend it just as well as she could. When they make it to the tower, Cleaves tries to set contact the Mainland for rescue while Amy tries to discern which of the Doctors is the real one, adamant that there could be only one of them. Cleaves gets the system searching for Rory and contacts the Mainland while the Gangers intercept the transmission and listen in. Elsewhere, Ganger Jennifer goes to the thermostatic room and tries to shut off the cooling vents but the machine refuses her access as she isn't human. In the evac tower, Amy sees the same woman with an eyepatch that she'd been seeing on a number of her recent travels but the Doctor doesn't seem worried. The Ganger Doctor, however, starts experiencing strange thoughts. Amy goes to speak with him and reveals to him that she'd seen the original Doctor's death. The Ganger goes berserk and pins Amy to the wall, ranting about what Ganger's feel when they die. Amy returns to the others and voices her fervent distrust of the Ganger Doctor while he insists that the Flesh now wants to multiply and grow at will. Cleaves and her team, despite the Doctor's insistence, refuse to heed his warnings and keep him under heavy scrutiny. Meanwhile, Rory wanders the factory looking for Jennifer and finds two of them in the same chamber, one human and one Ganger. Both try to convince Rory of their identities when they get into a fight and the Ganger falls into a puddle of acid, melting back into pure Flesh. Cleaves finds Rory and Jennifer on the monitors but, to the shock of Amy and the rest of the humans, the Doctor sends his Ganger to collect them with Buzzer agreeing to accompany him. Jennifer leads Rory to the thermostatic room and has him disable the cooling system in her place which starts heating up the acid beneath the island, putting it at risk of exploding. Cleaves contacts the Mainland for the rescue shuttle when the system shuts off; Ganger Cleaves continues the call with the codeword human Cleaves input, already figuring what the codeword was as it was her that had sent it, and orders the shuttle to collect them instead. Rory and Jennifer wander into a usually-locked room and stumble across a pile of discarded Flesh, start half resembling Gangers, left to rot while still conscious. Outside, the Ganger Doctor and Buzzer find Jennifer's body, only just dying as they discover her; as he realises that the Jennifer Rory is with must be a Ganger, Buzzer knocks the Ganger Doctor out, as Cleaves had ordered him to. While the rest of the humans make their way to the thermostatic room, Buzzer heads to meet them and finds the Ganger Jennifer beside the Flesh pile before she forcibly elongates her jaw and attacks him. In the thermostatic chamber, the Doctor finds that the sabotage is irreversible and everybody is forced to flee as the system overloads. They run into Rory who tells them that there is a secret passage that Jennifer found that may lead them under the TARDIS, leading from the crypt. Outside, the rest of the Gangers find the Ganger Doctor and convince him to cooperate with them. Rory leads the humans to the acid chamber when Jennifer seals them inside, revealing to him finally that she is just another Ganger before dragging him away while the acid bowl starts to heat up. Rory is furious about being deceived when Ganger Jennifer tries to convince the Doctor to join her cause; Rory goes off to release the others but the Ganger Doctor won't let him leave. As the humans try and seal off the acid bowl, the phone goes off in the dining room and the Ganger Doctor answers it to Jimmy's son Adam on his birthday morning. The sight of him makes the Ganger Jimmy run off to release the humans and, to Jennifer's fury, the others follow. Just as the Gangers get to the crypt, the acid bowl's lid human Jimmy was attempting to keep closed leaks and thursts acid all over him, reaching his heart just as his Ganger arrives. Jimmy gives the Ganger his wedding band as he dies, handing his identity permanently over to his duplicate; everybody returns to the dining hall where Jimmy speaks with Adam for the first time and the boy is delighted to learn that his dad is coming home today. After the call, the Doctor leads everybody through the tunnels and run into Jennifer's Ganger, now transformed into an elongated monster that chases them back through the tunnels. They try and shut her out but the door doesn't lock, so Dicken tries to lock the far door. The lock breaks off so Dicken shuts the door behind him and is killed by the Ganger. To both Doctors' relief, the TARDIS falls into the passageway through the roof and he orders everybody to get inside. The Doctor insists that he has to stay to give them a chance to escape but Amy refuses to agree with it. The Ganger Doctor approaches and asks her if she thinks he should stay and die instead; she insists that he simply isn't the Doctor that she knows when both he and the other Doctor admit to have been pretending to be one another the entire time, swapping shoes to keep the facade as they needed to learn about the Flesh, prove that they were the same and could only do that from Amy's point of view. Amy apologises to the real Ganger and he warns her to "push. But only she she tells her to.' Amy hurries into the TARDIS with Rory while the Doctor gives his Ganger and Ganger Cleaves, who refuses to leave, the sonic to take care of Jennifer's Ganger while he gets into the TARDIS and leaves. With a bid of confidence, the Gangers swing the door open to Jennifer and melt her with the sonic, taking themselves with it. In the TARDIS, the Doctor stablises the remaining Gangers and gives Cleaves a remedy for her cranial blood clot before depositing them where they all need to be. After leaving Cleaves and Dicken to explain the events in the factory, Amy suddenly recoils from a pain in the stomach helps Rory get him inside the TARDIS. He explains to Amy and Rory that she's suffering from contractions on account of going into labour and admits that they didn't wind up at the factory by accident; he'd directed them there so they could learn enough about the Flesh so he could block it's signal to Amy. Ordering a reluctant Rory to stand aside, the Doctor promises that however hard they have to search, they'll find Amy before raising his sonic and using it on her, reducing her to a puddle of pure Flesh, as she had been the entire time. The real Amy wakes up to the face of the eye-patched woman looking down at her, telling her to push as she notices that she is on the brink of giving birth... Cast * The Doctor - Matt Smith * Amy Pond - Karen Gillan * Rory - Arthur Darvill * Jimmy - Mark Bonnar * Buzzer - Marshall Lancaster * Jennifer - Sarah Smart * Cleaves - Raquel Cassidy * Dicken - Leon Vickers * Eye patch lady - Frances Barber * Adam - Edmond Moulton Crew To be added References To be added Story Notes To be added Continuity To be added Home video and audio releases To be added External Links * Official ''The Almost People'' page on '''Doctor Who Website